Manufacturers of discrete wire harness assemblies must usually arrange to provide an extensive inventory of components that require high labor content to assemble in order to produce acceptable finished products to their OEM customers. Labor-intensive tasks commonly include selecting and handling correct wires types and sizes, and selecting from a myriad of loose piece components such as connector headshells, hardware, clips, terminals, all from among large numbers of bulk supplies. Other tasks include pulling wire and routing groups of wires around pegs and other such layout fixtures to establish proper lengths for each wire of a product being manufactured, inserting wires into terminal and jacket crimping and forming machines, and snapping or inserting terminated wires into proper cavities of connector or cable end headshells, or arranging groups of wires, cables, or ribbon cable onto insulation-displacement devices and mass-terminating these groups using an arbor press or some other high-force machine.
Often assembly fixtures are fitted to move on conveyor systems, and a work shift can include several different products to be made within the same work cell. Changeovers from one product to the next often require that automated machinery such as for wire cutting or stripping, or for supplying and crimping terminals onto wire ends, must be re-adjusted or re-configured.
Thus cable assembly work entails much dexterity, attention to details, fine finger work, and the ability to follow complex assembly and testing instructions, and to react correctly as these instructions are changed to follow various and flexible production schedules.
In wire harness manufacturing, opportunities for error abound, for example: mis-wiring, incomplete production steps such as failures to make a good electrical connection due to an incomplete deformation of conductive materials in a contact or terminal, incomplete compression of a connector headshell and failure of it to snap closed or to achieve proper mass terminations, or using the wrong wire gauge sizes or terminating wires to the wrong style of terminal.
Furthermore, wire harness manufacturing entails an intense amount of complex and detailed work, all of which must be executed competently and correctly. Error trapping and detection and elimination of non-conforming products from the supply chain is designed in at many check-points in the process.
Thus opportunities exist and will continue to exist for reducing labor costs by simplifying tasks, impeding or precluding incorrect actions (‘poka yoke’) or by ganging similar tasks and providing machines that can execute sets of similar functions simultaneously. New technologies, products, materials and methods will always import with them unforeseen opportunities for new errors and product deficiencies, but among these will always arise other opportunities to improve the tools and methods within the cable and wire harness manufacturing industry.